So I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 and wanted to see how it compares to the Pi 3 in terms of cpu power. Turns out there really is quite a practical difference!
In this very simple example scene, I have the standard “Default Cube” with a basic principled shader and no effects, and a 1K hdri map from www.hdrihaven.com as the background. I left it at 128 samples, and 50% size, which is 960×540.
The Pi 3 renders this example scene in 2 minutes and 8 seconds.
The Pi 4 does this in just over 45 seconds!
As a point of comparison, my Ryzen 2700x will take 20.2 seconds to render this, single threaded. Not really a fair comparison, but it does show that the Pi4 can be almost half as fast as a single desktop thread, in some workloads. It does, however get pretty hot doing this if you only have a heatsink, and no fan attached.
In the Mind of Chris 